When she lost her husband to a heart attack, Joan Didion (December 5, 1934 - December 23, 2021) treaded grief and wrote the extraordinary The Year of Magical Thinking. A year later, her daughter died after a sustained illness. Blue Nights is about her daughter's death.

Whereas Magical Thinking was an eviscerating, immediate account of grief, Blue Nights takes a more removed (but no less painful) view.

It is horrible to see oneself die without children.
Napoleon Bonaparte said that.
What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead.
Euripedes said that.
When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.
I said that.

The loss of a child is an inconceivable thing. Unimaginable. It throws us into abstraction.

"Pierced Form" by Barbara Hepworth, 1962. Carved from Nigerian guarea wood. Learn more.

Didion tries to right herself by readjusting her focus from present to past to present. She digs into minutia and scrapes at broad questions. Her writing is deliberate and unaffected by the audience. She, at times, abandons the logic that abandoned her.

The way in which you live most of your life in California and then you don't? The way in which your awareness of this passing time—this permanent slowing, this vanishing resilience—multiplies, metastasizes, becomes your very life.

Cultural critic and essayist Christopher Hitchens thought Didion's book was a form of memory. "In this supremely tender work of memory, Didion is paradoxically insistent that as long as one person is condemned to remember, there can still be pain and loss and anguish it is."   Hitchens, a longtime critic for Vanity Fair, sought to define and understand his own mortality when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. His Mortality is a study of the connection between body and that something else makes us human. Hitchens, an outspoken atheist, concludes they are inseparable, "I don't have a body, I am a body."   
We all veer around our unknowable real mortality. Didion believed the closest we can ever come to understanding death is to lose a child. This most inseparable bond, broken.

Blue nights in London. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Jumping into memory (which many writers and thinkers have considered a space and place), Didion is a storyteller, a filmmaker. She's deciding what to show and name because it's the only way she knows. The language itself is invented, new.

In Blue Nights, Didion clings to what remains, the parts of her daughter, the thing she made precious by caring:

There was a period, a long period, dating from my childhood until quite recently. A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep them with me, by preserving their mementos, their "things," their totems.

Didion, a sharp, witty journalist, and novelist of culture and society, is at her best here. These books never could have been written had John or Quintana lived. Not just because the subject matter wasn't relevant, but the Joan Didion who wrote them wasn't extant. The regurgitation and regeneration of self in grief created her.

I know what the frailty is; I know what the fear is.
The fear is not for what is lost.
What is lost is already in the wall.
What is lost is already behind the locked doors.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
You may see nothing still to be lost.
Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.

"The Sick Child" etching by Edvard Munch 1894. Munch's survival guilt when his sister died from tuberculosis inspired his reworking this piece many times. Each captures that moment before death. Photo: Nasjonalmuseet / Ivarsøy, Dag Andre © Tate

Read more about the physical ache of grief from C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed, an illuminative essay on grief that asks, "Where do we go once we die?" among other things. I also warmly recommend Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk, a story of post-grief retrenchment and how to reopen a shattered self.